The latest phone to come from Huawei’s sub-brand Honor is the Honor Play, so-called because of its emphasis on gaming. With an ever-growing market for gaming PCs and laptops, “gaming phones” are becoming more widespread. Razer brought out the high-powered Razer Phone, and Asus unveiled its ROG phone earlier this year. Honor is trying to match them with its new Play handset, and thanks to its GPU Turbo technology, it might just do it – for a fraction of the price.
GPU Turbo is a technology that allows the handset’s graphics processor to deliver top quality performance, but much more efficiently. Essentially, GPU Turbo improves the efficiency of the GPU by 60 per cent, meaning that when you’re playing a game, you’re getting the best performance – without it completely eating the battery and processing power of your phone. We all know that gaming on a mobile phone can drastically drain the battery, and there’s nothing more inconvenient than having to cut your game short while you charge your handset. That’s only part of what GPU Turbo has been designed to combat. It reduces battery drain by 30 per cent, while still giving you the highest quality gaming experience possible.
If you don’t want to have to buy a brand new handset to make use of GPU Turbo though, you needn’t worry – Huawei will be rolling out an update to introduce the technology to a range of its current handsets, including Honor 10, Honor 9 Lite, Honor 7X, Mate 9 and 10 and Huawei P10 and P20, over the next few months. That means if you currently have a Huawei handset, your gaming experience is set to get a whole lot better. And, going forward, it’s going to be the “core capability” of all Honor handsets.
GameBench, developers of mobile game performance analysis tools, ran some tests on a Honor 10 handset, with GPU Turbo turned both on and off. Using the game Mobile Legends to test, they recorded a median frame rate of 54fps without GPU Turbo activated. In turning the GPU Turbo on, however, the same game running on the same settings was able to achieve an average frame rate of 59fps (it’s capped at 60). That’s a pretty impressive improvement - especially when you consider that Google’s flagship phone, the Pixel 2, achieved 57fps in the same test. (As an aside, the Pixel 2 is over £200 more expensive than the Honor 10.)
The power of GPU Turbo is pretty plain to see with those results. Exactly how Huawei and Honor have managed to achieve such a thing is unclear – but considering that leading mobile titles PUBG Mobile and Asphalt 9: Legends have partnered with Honor, it shows that there’s a lot of support for GPU Turbo’s ingenuity. PUBG has been announced as the official gaming partner for the Honor Play, with more Honor devices set to partner with the game as the GPU Turbo updates roll out.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a power-hungry game, but on the Honor Play, it’s able to achieve a full frame rate of over 39fps, and a negligible jitter rate of 0.21%. With the extra power afforded by GPU Turbo in terms of graphical power and battery life, there really is no better way to play.
For more information on Honor Play, please read here
